An Alberta seed grower's strategy for winter wheat may be helpful for a shorter growing season this year.

Bob Mastin is the owner of Mastin Seeds in Sundre, and has some newer varieties he believes will help growers achieve an early harvest two years in a row.

Mastin says, he specializes in shorter growing seasons and has two proposals for first year variety choices.

"The main ones are a very early maturing yellow pea. It's a new yellow pea and it's the earliest maturing pea in Canada, and Polish canola, which is about an average a month earlier than most canolas."

He says, the Early One Polish canola was developed in Saskatoon, and is a part of the latest genetic developments in synthetic Polish hybrid canolas.

Mastin adds, the early maturing yellow pea is called AAC Peace River, which is similar to CDC Meadow, but matures four to five days earlier.

A few years ago, Mastin had received a promising variety of winter wheat from the Lacombe Research Centre called Pintail.

"I'd never grown winter wheat before, and probably ran into the same problem most farmers do, which is farming land that you can put it on. Either you're going to have to summerfallow for a long time until you can seed in the last part of August or first part of September, or have a very early maturing crop that you can take off."

He says, the Polish canola then became more valuable to him as he started working the winter wheat into his rotation.

With this year's lingering winter conditions, Mastin says there could be more of a demand for this strategy.

“If we’re seeding in late May or early June, they’ll be wanting an early maturing variety even without any consideration of the winter wheat follow-up, just for ‘crisis management’, with the hope of getting the crop harvested in the fall. But if it’s anywhere close to a normal year, and they put it in at regular seeding time, it should be off early enough to then double crop and put in the winter wheat right away.”

Mastin Seeds has a distribution network across Western Canada, and he says, South Country Co-op and Crop Production Services in High River handle some of his products.

 

Send your news tips, story ideas and comments to jgiles@goldenwestradio.com